[MOBY-dev] registering INB services in Canada

[Natalia Jimenez Lozano]

Hi,

I would like to open a discussion about ontologies. I belong to the INB 
where we have currently a lot of working services. We would like to 
register all of our services in Canada but due to the differences 
between both ontologies (Canada and Spain), we could ran into the 
following problems:

a) Identical objects (objects that share the same name and the same 
hierarchy): in this case there would be no problem using the object 
previously registered in Canada.

b) Analogous objects (objects that share the same name but different 
hierarchy): it would be possible to register in Canada the object with 
the same name but different hierarchy? If it would be possible we would 
be "breaking" the Canadian ontology :-(

Some examples of this situation can be easily found:

    b.1. NCBI_BLAST_Text: in Spanish ontology, this object is a son of 
text_formatted node but in Canadian ontology is a son of BLAST-Report 
that is at the same time a son of Sequence_alignment_report.
    b.2. There is a lot of common objects like Clustalw_Evaluated_Text, 
FASTA, GFF ..., etc which only difference is their depencency: in 
Canadian ontology, these objects are depending on text-formatted node 
but in the Spanish ontology on text_formatted (the only difference is 
hyphen/underscore!).

c) Similar objects (different name -similar, upper-case/lower case, 
underscore/hyphen- and/or different hierarchy but same meaning): to fit 
to this last situation, we have several options:

    - To register INB objects -> this would not "break" the Canadian 
ontology but would "blur" it.
    - To adjust each one of the INB services to the Canadian ontology -> 
This would mean the modification of the code of each one of the services 
and it would require an extra work.
    - To modify INB ontology to adjust to Canadian ontology -> This 
would be a thorny issue because since INB beginnings we have work very 
hard in this sense. Even we organized an ontology committee to give 
advise on each new object to be registered. Moreover, few months ago we 
restructured our ontology with the aim of removing inconsistencies. In 
my opinion, we have currently a very solid ontology.

Suggestions about how to register INB services in a easily and not 
damaging way?
Thank you very much in advance,
Regards,
Natalia